Callicles and Thrasymachus

Callicles and Thrasymachus are the two great exemplars in philosophy
of contemptuous challenge to conventional morality. Both are
characters in Platonic dialogues, in the Gorgias and Book I
of the Republic respectively; both denounce the virtue of
justice, dikaiosunê, as an artificial brake on
self-interest, a fraud to be seen through by intelligent people.
Together, Thrasymachus and Callicles have fallen into the folk
mythology of moral philosophy as ‘the immoralist’ (or
‘amoralist’). These are perhaps not quite the right words,
but it is useful to have a label for their common
challenge—more generally, for the figure who demands a good reason to abide by
moral constraints, and denies, implicitly or explicitly, that this
demand can be
met.[1]
Because of this shared agenda, and because Socrates’ refutation
of Callicles can be read as an unsatisfying rehearsal for the
Republic, it is tempting to assume that the two share a
single philosophical position. But in fact Callicles and Thrasymachus
are by no means interchangeable; and the differences between them are
important both for the interpretation of Plato and philosophically,
for our understanding of the varieties of immoralism and the
motivations behind it. This article discusses both the common
challenge presented by these two figures and the features which
separate them, treating them strictly as players in Plato’s
philosophical dramas. (Thrasymachus was a real person, a famous
diplomat and orator of whose real views we know only a little; of
Callicles we know nothing, and he may even be Plato’s
invention.)[2]
It will also compare them to a third Platonic version of the
immoralist challenge, the one presented by Glaucon and Adeimantus in
Republic Book II, and to the writings of sophist
Antiphon—the best-known real-life counterpart of all three Platonic
views, and perhaps their historical original. Certain aspects of
Plato’s own arguments against immoralism will also be discussed,
insofar as they help to clarify what Callicles and Thrasymachus
themselves have to say.

1. Justice

What exactly is it that both Thrasymachus and Callicles reject? Greek
handily distinguishes between ‘justice’ as a virtue
[dikaiosunê] and the abstractions ‘justice’
[dikê, sometimes personified as a goddess] and
‘the just’ [or ‘what is just’, to
dikaion, the neuter form of the adjective ‘just’,
masc. dikaios]. The history of these concepts is complex, and
it would be wrong to assume that Greek moral concepts were ever neatly
defined or uncontested. Still, Hesiod’s Works and Days
(c. 700 B.C.E.), a very early and canonical text for traditional Greek
moral thought, provides a useful baseline for later debates. Hesiod
does not define justice, but the injustices he denounces include
bribery, oath-breaking, perjury, theft, fraud, and the rendering of
crooked verdicts by judges. There are two kinds of underlying unity to
this list, each of which relates justice to another central concept in
ancient Greek ethics. First, all such actions are prohibited by
nomos. This crucial term may be translated either
‘law’ or ‘convention’, depending on the
context; nomoi include not only written statutes but
unwritten laws and traditional, socially enforced norms of behavior.
Hesiod’s just man is above all a law-abiding one, and the
association of justice and nomos runs deep in Greek thought.
However, nomos is also an ambiguous and open-ended concept:
in the fifth century B.C.E. sophistic thinkers come to use it with the
very different sense of mere convention—or, as we might now
say, social construction—and this development is an important
part of the background to immoralism. The second common denominator of
Hesiodic injustice is that unjust actions are ones typically prompted
by pleonexia, best translated ‘greed’ (see Balot
2001). The unjust man is motivated by the desire to have more
[pleon echein]: more than he has, more than his neighbor has,
more than he is entitled to, and, ultimately, all there is to get.
These polarities of the lawful/unlawful and the restrained/greedy are
later used by Aristotle to structure his discussion of justice in
Nicomachean Ethics V, which is in many ways a rational
reconstruction of traditional Greek thought about justice.

Hesiod also sets out the origins, authority, and rewards of justice.
Here he is explicit:

The son of Kronos [i.e., Zeus] has set down this law [nomos]
for human beings:
Fish and animals and winged birds
Eat each other, since there is no justice [dikê] among
them.
But to humans he has given justice [dikê], which turns
out the best
By far. And if one knows and is willing to proclaim what is just
[ta dikaia],
Zeus far-sounding gives him wealth. (Works and Days 276–81)

Justice derives from nomos in the sense of a divinely
ordained Law; and Hesiod emphasises that Zeus’ laws are
enforced. Punishment may not be visited directly on the unjust
individual, however: rather, a whole city suffers for the injustice of
its leaders, and retribution may fall on a man’s descendants.
Moreover, Hesiod seems at one point to waver, and allows that if the
wicked go unpunished, we would not have good reason to be just
(270–3). Doubts about the reliability of divine rewards and
punishments are later an important part of the motivation for the
immoralist challenge; in Republic Book II, Adeimantus
complains that the poets are inconsistent on this point, and anyway
the rewards and punishments they promise do not show what is good and
bad about justice and injustice in themselves (362d–367e).

Hesiod represents only one side of early Greek moral thought. The
other foundational poet of the Greek tradition, Homer, has less to say
explicitly about justice; more important for later debates is his
broader conception of aretê, which can equally well be
translated ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence’. Justice
is understood to be a part of aretê; or, as we would
say, it is a virtue. More particularly it is the virtue
governing social interactions and good citizenship or leadership. In
the world of the Iliad and Odyssey,
aretê is understood as that set of skills and aptitudes
which enables someone—paradigmatically, a noble
warrior—to function successfully in his social role. The key virtues
of the Homeric warrior are courage and practical intelligence, which
enable him to be an effective ‘speaker of words and doer of
deeds’.[3]

Now this ‘functional’ conception of virtue, as we may call
it, can easily come into conflict with Hesiodic ideas about justice.
In Plato’s Meno, Meno proposes an updated version of
the functional conception: a man’s virtue consists in the
political skills which enable him to harm his enemies and help his
friends, without incurring harm to himself (71e). Such a view would
have been at least intelligible to Homer’s warriors; but it
seems to involve giving up on Hesiodic principles of justice. When
acting as a judge, does the virtuous man give verdicts in accordance
with the law, or does he give whatever verdicts (‘crooked’
ones by Hesiod’s standards) will harm his enemies or help his
friends?

So Plato’s characters inherit a complex and not wholly coherent
moral tradition. Fifth-century moral debates were powerfully shaped by
the problematic relation of these ‘functional’ and
‘Hesiodic’ ideas about the virtues (see Adkins 1960); and
the Gorgias and Book I of the Republic locate
Callicles and Thrasymachus in just this context. In the
Gorgias, Socrates’ first interlocutor is the
rhetorician Gorgias, who is led into self-contradiction by his
unclarity on the question of whether his profession includes the
teaching and practice of justice. His student Polus repudiates
Gorgias’ pretensions to justice, and claims that while it may be
more admirable than injustice, injustice is more beneficial to its
practitioner. Socrates shows that Polus’ position too is
ultimately incoherent, and thus the stage is set for Callicles to
reject justice (as conventionally understood) altogether, arguing that
it is neither admirable nor beneficial. The Republic depicts
a strikingly similar dialectical progression, again from age to youth
and from respectability to ruthlessness. It begins with a discussion
between Socrates and the elderly, decent-seeming businessman Cephalus,
who offers (or at any rate assents to Socrates’ suggestion of) a
markedly ‘Hesiodic’ account of justice as telling the
truth and returning what one owes (331c). But Cephalus’ son
Polemarchus, on ‘inheriting’ the argument, glosses
returning what one owes in Meno-esque terms: justice is rendering help
to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies (332a–b). We
seem to move instantly from Hesiod to a degenerate version of the
‘functional’ conception, expressive of Athenian politics
in an era of brutal, almost gangster-like factional strife. Neither
Cephalus nor Polemarchus seems to notice the conflict, but it runs
deep: justice cannot be at the same time (1) the Hesiodic virtue of
the good neighbour and solid citizen, involving obedience to law and
the restraint of pleonexia, and (2) a part of
aretê functionally understood, in a society in which
pleonexia and factional ruthlesssness are seen as the keys to
success. In sum, both the Gorgias and Book I of the
Republic reveal a society in some moral disorder, vulnerable
to moral conflict and instability, with generational change used to
dramatize a crumbling of Hesiodic norms. In both cases the upshot, to
which Socrates must respond, is a fully formed challenge to justice
traditionally conceived.

2. Thrasymachus

Though the Gorgias was almost certainly written first of the
two dialogues, Thrasymachus’ position can be seen as a kind of
stepping-stone to Callicles’, so that it makes sense to begin
with him. Thrasymachus’ stance on justice is foreshadowed by his
behavior: he enters the discussion “like a wild beast about to
spring” (336b5–6; tr. Grube-Reeve 1992 here and
throughout, sometimes with minor revisions), and this tone of
impatient aggression is sustained throughout his discussion with
Socrates. As a professional sophist, however, Thrasymachus withholds
his definition of justice until Socrates’ other interlocutors
have promised to pay him for it. So from the very start, Thrasymachus
is depicted as dominated by the characteristic drives of the two lower
parts of the soul to be identified in Book IV: the appetitive part
[epithumêtikon], which lusts after pleasure and the
money to pay for it with, and the spirited part [thumos],
which loves competition and victory. Though he proves quite a wily
debater, Thrasymachus’ reasoning abilities are used only as a
means to these other, non-rational ends; and this subjugation of
rationality to non-rational ends is, as we discover in Book IV,
exactly what Plato holds injustice to consist in. Thrasymachus largely
disappears from the debate after Book I, but he evidently stays around
for the whole of the discussion; somewhat mysteriously, in Book VI
Socrates refers to Thrasymachus and himself as “just now having
become friends” (498d, cf. 450a–b).)

Thrasymachus eventually proposes a resounding slogan: “Justice
is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger”
(338c2–3). He explains that each kind of regime makes laws in
the interest of the ruling party: the mass of poor people in a
democracy, the rich in an oligarchy, the tyrant in a tyranny.
“And they declare what they have made—what is to their
own advantage—to be just for their subjects…. This,
then, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities, the advantage
of the established regime” (338e–339a). Thanks to this gloss of
the ‘stronger’ in terms of the ruling power,
Thrasymachus’ position has often been interpreted as a form of
‘conventionalism’: justice in a given community is
whatever the laws of that community dictate, i.e., so he cynically
explains, whatever serves the ruling party’s interests. This
conventionalist reading of Thrasymachus is probably not quite right,
but it makes a convenient starting-point for seeing what he does have
in mind. The conventionalist position can be seen as a more formal
version of the Hesiodic association of just behavior with
law-abidingness, and does not necessarily involve the cynical spin
that Thrasymachus gives it: in Xenophon’s Memorabilia,
Socrates himself argues that the lawful [nomimon] and the
just [dikaion] are the same (IV 4). Closer to Thrasymachus in
spirit is the conventionalism to be found in the surviving fragments
of On Truth by the sophist Antiphon (cf. section 6).
According to Antiphon, “Justice [dikaiosunê]...
is not violating the rules [nomima] of the city in which one
is a citizen” (tr. Gagarin and Woodruff 1995). Antiphon goes on
to contrast these rules of justice, which frustrate our nature and are
only erratically enforced, with the authoritative and irresistible
decrees of nature [phusis]. This contrast between
nomos and phusis is a central tool of sophistic
thought, used by a wide range of thinkers, Callicles included (see
below, Section 4), in many different ways (see Kerferd 1981, Guthrie
1971). Thrasymachus himself, however, never uses this theoretical
framework (or, unless we count his concept of the ‘real
ruler’, any other)—a sign, perhaps, that he is meant to
represent the immoralist position in its roughest and least
theoretical form, purporting to spring directly from empirical
observation of how law and justice work.

To these two opening claims, ‘Justice is the advantage of the
stronger’ and ‘Justice is the advantage of the
ruler’, Thrasymachus adds a third, in the course of praising
injustice later on: ‘Justice is the advantage of another
person’ (343c). This certainly sounds like a non-conventionalist
claim about the underlying nature of justice, and it greatly
complicates the interpretation of his position. Thrasymachus advances
all three theses willingly, indeed with great conviction, and the
third seems intended as a clarification of the first two. Yet on the
face of it they are far from equivalent, and it is not at all obvious
which (if any) is most basic or best represents his real position. For
instance, what if I am the stronger (or the ruler): is it the
action to my own advantage which is just, or the one which serves the
other person? Worse, if either ‘the advantage of the
stronger’ or ‘the advantage of the ruler’ is taken
strictly as a general definition, then the selfish behavior of a
strong, rapacious tyrant would have to count as just. But it obviously
does not serve the interests of the other people affected by it; and
indeed Thrasymachus, in conformity to normal usage, describes the
tyrant as perfectly unjust (344a–c)—and praises him
for being so.

In recent decades interpretive discussion of Thrasymachus has revolved
around proposed solutions to this puzzle, none of which has met with
general agreement. Argument continues as to whether his three theses
can be rendered consistent with each other, whether to do so requires
limiting the scope of one or all of them in some way (e.g., by
excluding rulers and applying only to the ruled), whether any of them
should be given priority as Thrasymachus’ intended
definition of justice, and if so which one. Interpreters
determined to render Thrasymachus the possessor of a coherent theory
of justice have worked through the philosophical possibilities here
with great ingenuity and resourcefulness. However, all such readings
require taking some of the things he says as less than fully or
literally meant, and it is anyway not obvious that Plato
intends to present him as the proponent of a consistent and
rigorous definition. The obvious alternative is to read his theses as
rough slogans rather than attempts at definition, and as picking out
the typical effects of just behavior rather than attempting
to analyse it or state its essence. So read, Thrasymachus is offering
a critique of justice, understood in rather traditional terms, not a
new theory or analysis of what justice is (cf. Anderson 2016 on
‘genealogy’). As his later, clarificatory rant in praise
of injustice makes clear (343b–4c), he assumes the
traditional Hesiodic understanding of justice, as obedience to
nomos and restraint of pleonexia: his slogans are
intended not to replace or revise that traditional conception but
rather to offer a debunking or critique of justice so understood.
(Hence his proclamation that justice is ‘nothing other’
than the advantage of the stronger: the locution is one of cynical
debunking, marking his own view as a ‘seeing-through’ and
demystification.) This critique is organized around two central
points. One is about the effects of just behavior, namely
that it benefits other people at the expense of just agents themselves
(this is justice as the advantage of the other). The other is about
the function of moral language: talk of ‘justice’ is an
instrument of social control, a tool used by the powerful to
manipulate the weak (this is justice as the advantage of the stronger,
i.e. the rulers). If we take these two points together, it turns out
that just persons are nothing but patsies or fools: they have
internalized the moralistic propaganda of the ruling party so that
they serve their interests rather than their own.

On this reading, Thrasymachus’ three theses are coherent, and
unrestricted in their scope; but they are not definitions. They are
exercises in social critique rather than philosophical analysis; and
yet Thrasymachus’ debunking is not, and could not be, grounded
purely on philosophically neutral ‘sociological’
observation. Thrasymachus is—on almost any reading –
relying on a further pair of assumptions, which we can also find on
display in the speeches of Callicles and of Glaucon in Book II, as
well as other contemporary texts. One is that wealth and power, and
the pleasures they provide, are the goods in relation to
which our ‘advantage’ must be assessed.
(‘Good’ [agathon] and ‘advantage’
[sumpheron] are equivalent terms in this context, and
‘happiness’ [eudaimonia] is what they produce.)
The other is that these goods are zero-sum: for one member of
a community to have more of them is for another to have less. That is
why just behavior on my part, which involves forgoing opportunities
for my own advantage out of respect for the law, inevitably serves the
advantage of other people—in particular, those who are willing
to ‘take advantage’ of me (as we still say), and above all
the self-interested rulers who made the laws. These twin assumptions
about the nature of the good also shape Thrasymachus’ conception
of rationality. The rational or intelligent man for him is one who,
seeing through the mystifications of moral language, acts
clear-sightedly to serve himself rather than others. When Socrates
asks whether, then, he holds that justice is a vice, Thrasymachus
instead defines it as a kind of intellectual failure: “No, just
very high-minded simplicity,” he says, while injustice is
“good judgment” and is to be “included with virtue
and wisdom” (348c–e).

Thrasymachus’ conception of rationality as the clear-eyed
pursuit of pleonexia is most fully expressed in his idea of
the ‘real ruler’. This Thrasymachean ideal emerges only
under interrogation by Socrates; but it is evidently central to his
thinking, and provides the framework for the arguments with Socrates
which follow. Socrates begins by subjecting Thrasymachus to a classic
elenchus—that is, a refutation which elicits a
contradiction from the interlocutor’s own assertions or
admissions (339b–340b). Thrasymachus has claimed both that (1) to do
what the rulers prescribe is just, and (2) to do what is to the
rulers’ advantage is just; and he readily admits that (3) rulers
sometimes prescribe what is not to their advantage. It follows that
(4) in some cases, it is both just and unjust to do as the rulers
prescribe. On the assumption that nothing can be both just and unjust,
one of claims (1)–(3) must be given up. It comes as a bit of a
surprise that Thrasymachus chooses to repudiate (3), which seems to be
a matter of obvious fact, rather than (1) or (2). Plato emphasises the
point by having Cleitophon and Polemarchus provide color commentary on
the argument, with the former charitably suggesting that Thrasymachus
meant that the just is whatever the stronger decrees,
thinking it is to his advantage—in effect, an
amendment to (2) which would make it equivalent to (1). But this
solution is vehemently rejected by Thrasymachus (340a–c). Instead, he
affirms that, ‘strictly speaking’, no ruler ever errs. For
a ruler is properly speaking the practitioner of a craft
[technê], just like a doctor; and, Thrasymachus
explains, when in premises (1) and (2) he speaks of the ruler it is in
this strict sense. And this expert ruler qua ruler does not err: by
definition he acts as his craft of ruling demands.

Thrasymachus, it turns out, is passionately committed to this ideal of
the rational ruler ‘in the strict sense’, construed as the
intelligently exploitative tyrant, and Socrates’ arguments
against him soon zero in on it. Moreover, the ideal of the wholly
rational ruler is the keystone of Plato’s own political
philosophy, soon to be elaborated as the
‘philosopher-king’ of Republic V-VII (and again
later in his dialogue Statesman). So it is very striking that
it is first introduced in the Republic not as a Socratic
concept but as a Thrasymachean one. Plato thus seems to mark it as an
idea appropriated from the sophistic enemy; it is at any rate a
precious piece of common ground which can provide a starting-point for
arguments between Socrates and Thrasymachus, who otherwise agree on so
little.

Before turning to those arguments, it is worth asking what
Thrasymachus’ ideal of the ruler in the strict sense adds to his
account of justice. It seems to confirm that he is no conventionalist:
conventionalism involves treating all socially recognised laws as
equal, whereas on Thrasymachus’ account not every ruler or act
of legislation counts as the real thing. A trickier point is that
Thrasymachus’ glorification of tyranny renders retroactively
ambiguous his slogan, ‘Justice is the advantage of the
stronger’. As initially presented, the point of this seemed to
be the claim noted earlier about the standard effects of just
behavior: just persons are the victims of everyone who is willing to
take advantage of them, and the ruling class in particular. But
Thrasymachus’ praise of the expert tyrant (343b–c) suggests
another interpretation. Perhaps his slogan also stands for a
revisionist normative claim: that it really is right and
proper, part of the correct order of things, for the strong to take
advantage of the weak. This is precisely the claim that, as we will
see, is expressed in the Gorgias by Callicles’ theory
of ‘natural justice’. If Thrasymachus too means to make
this claim then he, like Callicles, turns out to have a substantive
normative ethical theory—a view about how the world
ought to be. However, as we have seen, Thrasymachus only
flirts with the revision of ordinary moral language which this view
would entail; when Socrates suggests that according to him justice is
a vice and injustice a virtue, he at first attempts to eschew such
moral categories altogether, reverting again to the pose of the
cynical sociological observer (348c–d). This hesitation seems to mark
Thrasymachus as caught in a delicate, unstable dialectical
way-station, in between a debunking of Hesiodic tradition (and for
that matter conventionalism) and a full-blown Calliclean reversal of
moral values. Thrasymachus occupies a position at which the
traditional language of ‘justice’ has been debunked as
merely a tool of the powerful, but no convincing redeployment
replacement has been found.

3. Socrates vs. Thrasymachus

After the opening elenchus which elicits Thrasymachus’
ideal of the real ruler, Socrates offers a series of five arguments
against various elements of his position, of which the first three
revolve around the shared hypothesis that ruling is a craft
[technê]. Socrates’ first argument (341b–342e) is
that real crafts, such as medicine, are disinterested, serving some
good distinct from the good of the practitioner: the end served by the
doctor qua doctor is the health of the patient. So Thrasymachus’
selfish tyrant cannot be practising a craft; the real ruler properly
understood is the one who expertly serves his weaker subjects. This
argument is bitterly resisted by Thrasymachus (343a–345e). With what
looks like genuine disgust, he upbraids Socrates for infantile
naïveté: he might as well claim, absurdly, that shepherds
and cowherds fatten their flocks for the good of the sheep and cows
themselves. To reaffirm and clarify his position, Socrates offers a
further argument about wage-earning (345e–347d). It is precisely
because real crafts (such as medicine and, Socrates insists,
shepherding too) do not in themselves benefit their practitioners that
extrinsic ‘wages’ are given in return; and the best
‘wage’ for a ruler is not to be governed by someone worse
than himself. So again, the Thrasymachean ruler is not genuinely
practising a craft.

Third, Socrates argues that Thrasymachean rule is formally or
structurally unlike the real crafts (349a–350c). A craftsperson does
not seek to ‘outdo’ [pleonektein] fellow craft
practitioners but to do the same as they, i.e., to perform whatever
action the craft requires. The just person, who does not seek to
‘outdo’ other just people, fits this pattern, while the
Thrasymachean ruler again does not. And since craft is a paradigm of
goodness and cleverness in its specialized area, “a just person
has turned out to be good and clever, and an unjust one ignorant and
bad” (350c). Socrates takes this as equivalent to showing that
“justice is virtue and wisdom and that injustice is vice and
ignorance” (350d). The slippery slope in these last moves is
questionable, and use of pleonektein in this argument is
confusing (and perhaps confused). Nonetheless it raises an important
point, which confronts head-on one of Thrasymachus’ deepest
assumptions: the goods realized by genuine crafts are not
zero-sum. The doctor’s restoration of the patient’s health
does not make anyone else less healthy; if one musician plays in tune,
so may another.

All these arguments rely on the hypothesis that the ‘real
ruler’ is practising a craft [technê], and appeal
to various features of the recognised crafts to establish that real
ruling has a Socratic rather than a Thrasymachean profile. This is not
only a direct attack on Thrasymachus’ account of the real ruler,
it raises the very basic question of how justice is related to
practical reason. The real ruler is, for Socrates and Thrasymachus
both, an ideal of successful rational agency; and the recognized
crafts provide a model for spelling out what that ideal must involve.
By asking what ruling as a technê would be
like—self-interested or other-directed, dedicated to zero-sum goals or
not—they are really addressing a more general and still-vital set
of questions: what does practical reason as such consist in? Is it
reducible to the intelligent pursuit of self-interest, or does it
involve some responsiveness to non-self-interested reasons? The
dispute can also be framed in terms of the nature of the good, which
the rational person is assumed to pursue: does it consist in zero-sum
goods like wealth and power (and the pleasures they can provide), or
in ones which can be attained in a cooperative rather than a
pleonectic way?

Once he has established that justice, like the other crafts and
virtues, is an other-directed form of practical reason aimed at
non-zero-sum goods, Socrates turns to consider its nature and powers
more directly. Injustice, he argues, is by nature a cause of disunity,
strife, and, therefore, disempowerment and ineffectiveness
(351a–352b). Even a gang of thieves can only function successfully
when they are just amongst themselves. Likewise within the human soul:
justice is what harmonizes the soul and makes a person effective. At
this point Thrasymachus more or less gives up on the discussion, but
Socrates adds a fifth argument as the coup de grace
(352d–354c): justice, as the virtue of the soul (here deploying the
conclusion of the third argument), is what enables the soul to perform
its functions well, so that the just person lives well and happily.
This final argument is a close ancestor of the famous ‘function
argument’ used by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics I.7:
it shows that Plato (and for that matter Aristotle) by no means
rejects the Homeric ‘functional’ conception of virtue as
such. Rather, the whole argument of the Republic amounts to a
proof that it can be reconciled with the demands of Hesiodic justice,
if only we understand rightly what successful human functioning
consists in.

The focus of the argument has now come to rest where, in Plato’s
view, it really belongs: on the psychology of justice, and its effects
on the human soul. In fact, these last two arguments amount to a
specification of what justice in the soul must be. Justice is a virtue
of the soul—in a way, it is the virtue par excellence, since
by unifying the soul (as it does the city, or any human group) it
enables the other virtues to be exercised in successful action. But of
course this does not yet tell us what justice itself is, or
how it produces these characteristic effects. And no doubt
this is one reason (perhaps among many) that no one ever finds
Socrates’ arguments against Thrasymachus very satisfying or
convincing: not Glaucon and Adeimantus, who demand from Socrates an
argument which will reveal what justice really is and does (366e,
367b, e), not modern readers and interpreters, and certainly not
Thrasymachus himself. Even Socrates complains that, distracted by
Thrasymachus’ praise of injustice, he erred in trying to argue
that justice is advantageous without having first established what it
is (354a–c). Instead of defining justice, the Book I arguments have
taken as their target Thrasymachus’ assumptions about practical
rationality and advantage or the good, deployed in his conception of
the ‘real ruler’. Socrates’ larger argument in Books
II-IX will also engage with these, providing substantive alternative
accounts of the good, rationality, and political wisdom. However, this
larger-scale vindication of justice is presented as a response not
directly to Thrasymachus, but to the restatement of his argument which
Glaucon and Adeimantus offer (in the hope of being refuted) in Book
II. And since their version of the immoralist position departs in
significant ways from its inspiration, it is somewhat misleading to
treat the Republic as a whole as a response to Thrasymachus.
Rather, this division of labor confirms that for Plato, Thrasymachean
debunking is dialectically preliminary. It is useful for its clearing
away of conventional assumptions and hypocritical pieties: indeed
Socrates’ later arguments largely leave intact
Thrasymachus’ initial debunking theses about the effects of just
behaviour and the manipulative function of moral language (unless you
count a strikingly perfunctory appendix to the argument in Book X,
612a–3e). His role is simply to present the challenge these critical
insights lead to; for immoralism as part of a positive vision, we need
to turn to Callicles in the Gorgias.

4. Callicles

Nothing is known of any historical Callicles, and, if there were one,
it is odd that such a forceful personality would have left no trace in
the historical record. All we can say on the basis of the
Gorgias itself is that he is an Athenian aristocrat with
political ambitions and personal connections to Gorgias. E.R. Dodds
notes that, given Plato’s usual practices, “the
probabilities are strongly against” Callicles’ being
simply a literary invention (1959, 12); but as Dodds also remarks, it
is tempting to see in Callicles a fragment of Plato himself—a
frightening vision, perhaps, of what he might have become without
Socrates (1959, 14). At any rate the Gorgias repeatedly marks
him as a kind of antithesis or double to Socrates as the paradigmatic
philosopher. Socrates opens their debate with a somewhat jokey survey
of how much the two have in common (481c–d); they later exchange
speeches arguing for their diametrically opposed ways of life, with
repeated allusions to the contrasted brothers Zethus and Amphion in
Euripides’ play Antiope (485e, 486d, 489e, 506b). These
dramatic touches express the philosophical reality: more than any
other character in Plato, Callicles is Socrates’ philosophical
antithesis and polar opposite.

Callicles’ version of the immoralist challenge turns out to
involve four main components, which I will discuss in order: (1) a
critique of conventional justice, (2) a positive account of
‘justice according to nature’, (3) a theory of the
virtues, and (4) a hedonistic conception of the good.

(1) Conventional Justice: Callicles’ critique of conventional
justice emerges from his diagnosis of the orator Polus’ failure
in the preceding argument. Polus had accused Gorgias of succumbing to
shame in assenting to Socrates’ suggestion that he would teach
justice to any student ignorant of it; Callicles accuses Polus of
succumbing to shame himself, and being tricked by Socrates, whose
arguments equivocate between natural and conventional values.
According to convention [nomos], doing injustice is more
shameful than suffering it, as Polus allowed; but “by nature all
that is worse is also more shameful, like suffering what’s
unjust” (483a, tr. here and throughout Zeyl, sometimes revised).
Callicles locates the origins of the convention in a conspiracy of the
weak: “the people who institute our laws are the weak and the
many… they assign praise and blame with themselves and their
own advantage in mind” (483b). This diagnosis of ordinary moral
language as a mask for self-interest is reminiscent of Thrasymachus;
but there is also a contrast, for Thrasymachus presented the laws as
adapted to serve the strong, i.e., the rulers. Callicles is perhaps
more narrowly focussed on democratic societies, which he depicts as
involving the tyranny of the weak many over exceptional individuals.
The many “mold the best and the most powerful among us …
and with charms and incantations we subdue them into slavery, telling
them that one is supposed to get no more than his fair share”
(483e–484a). This rhetorically powerful critique of justice
inaugurates a durable philosophical tradition: Nietzsche, Foucault,
and their successors in various projects of genealogy and
‘unmasking’ are all Callicles’ heirs.

(2) Natural Justice: Callicles’ denunciation of conventional
justice is bound up with a ringing endorsement of its opposite, the
just ‘according to nature’; in fact his opening speech is
perhaps our most important text for the sophistic contrast between
nature [phusis] and convention [nomos].
Nomos is, as noted above (in section 1), first and foremost
Law in all its grandeur, attributed by Hesiod to the will of Zeus. But
in sophistic contexts, nomos is often used to designate some
norm or institution—language, religion, moral values, law
itself—as merely a matter of social construction. That is why
nomos varies from polis to polis and nation
to nation, and can be changed by our decisions. What is by nature, by
contrast, is a kind of ethical and political ‘given’,
outrunning our wishes or beliefs; and the contrast involves at least
an implicit privileging of nature as inherently authoritative (see
Kerferd 1981a, Chapter 10). This project of disentangling the
contributions of nature and convention in human life can be seen as an
extension to the human realm of Presocratic natural science, with its
attempts to identify the eternal explanatory first principles
[archai] behind the ever-changing, diverse phenomena of the
cosmos.

The implications of the nomos-phusis contrast always depend
on how the ‘natural’ is understood. Callicles looks both
to international politics and to the animal world to identify what is
natural rather than conventional: “both among the other animals
and in whole cities and races of men, it [nature] shows that this is
what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the
inferior and have a greater share than they” (483d). He adds two
examples at the level of ‘cities and races’: the invasions
of Greece by the Persian Emperor Xerxes, and of Scythia by his father
Darius (483d–e). He also imagines an individual within society who
would exercise superiority to the full: if a man of outsize ability
manages to throw off our moralistic shackles, “he would rise up
and be revealed as our master, and here the justice of nature would
shine forth” (484a–b). So what the justice of nature amounts to
is simple: it is for the superior man to appropriate the power and
possessions of the inferior (484c). Thus Callicles’ genealogy of
morals, like Glaucon’s in Republic II, presents
pleonexia as an eternal and universal first principle of
human nature; and he goes further than either Thrasymachus or Glaucon
in taking this nature as the basis for a positive norm.

For all its ranting sound, Callicles has a straightforward and
logically valid argument here: (1) observation of nature can disclose
the content of ‘natural justice’; (2) nature is to be
observed in the realms where moral conventions have no hold, viz among
states and among animals; (3) such observation discloses the
domination and exploitation of the weak by the strong; (4) therefore,
it is natural justice for the strong to rule over and have more than
the weak. From a modern point of view, premise (1) is likely to appear
the most dubious, for it violates the plausible principle, most
famously advanced by David Hume, that no normative claims may be
inferred from purely descriptive premises (‘no ought from an
is’). But then, legitimate or not, this kind of appeal to nature
runs through almost all of ancient ethics: it is central to the moral
theory of Plato himself, as well as Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the
Stoics. So Socrates’ objection is instead to (2) and (3):
Callicles gets nature wrong. In truth, Socrates insists later on,
“partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and
justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is
why they call this universe a world order, my friend, and not an
undisciplined world-disorder” (507e–508a). Callicles advocates
pleonexia only because he ‘neglects geometry’
(508a): instead of predatory animals, we should observe and emulate
the orderly structure of the cosmos as a whole.

(3) Callicles’ theory of the virtues: As with Thrasymachus,
Socrates’ response is to press Callicles regarding the deeper
commitments on which his views depend. He first prods Callicles to
articulate the conception of the ‘superior’ which his
account of natural justice involves. Callicles has said that nature
reveals that it is just for the ‘superior’,
‘better’ or ‘stronger’ to have more: but who
are they (488b–c)? In practice, as Socrates points out, ‘the
many’, whom Callicles has condemned as weak, are in fact
stronger: they are able, as Callicles himself has complained, to
suppress the gifted few. So, like Thrasymachus when faced with the
fact that rulers sometimes make mistakes in the pursuit of
self-interest, Callicles now has to distinguish the
‘strength’ he admires from actual political power. (This
leaves it unclear whether and why we should still see the invasions of
Darius and Xerxes as examples of the ‘strong’ exercising
the ‘justice of nature’; since both their expeditions were
notorious failures, the examples are rather perplexing anyway.)

Callicles goes on to articulate (with some help from Socrates) a
conception of ‘superiority’ in terms of a pair of very
traditional sounding virtues: intelligence [phronêsis],
particularly about the affairs of the city, and courage
[andreia], which makes men “competent to accomplish
whatever they have in mind, without slackening off because of softness
of spirit” (491a–b). These are the familiar
‘functional’ virtues of the Homeric warrior, and the claim
that such a man should be rewarded with a ‘greater share’
is no sophistic novelty but a restatement of the Homeric warrior
ethic: the best fighter in the battle of the day deserves the best cut
of the meat at night. At the same time, Callicles is interestingly
reluctant to describe his ‘superior’ man as possessing the
virtue of justice [dikaiosunê], which we might have
expected him to redefine as conformity to the justice of nature.
Instead, he seems to dispense with any conception of justice as a
virtue; and he explicitly rejects the fourth traditional virtue which
Plato will take as canonical in the Republic,
sôphrosunê, temperance or moderation.

This traditional side of Calliclean ‘natural justice’ is
worth emphasising, since Callicles is often read as a representative
of the sophistic movement and their subversive ‘modern’
ideas. (Nietzsche, for instance, discusses the sophists—with
immense admiration—in a way that is hard to make sense of
unless we take Callicles as a principal source (1968, 232–4; and
see Dodds 1958, 386–91, on Callicles’ influence on
Nietzsche’s own thought).) Despite Callicles’ opposition
of nomos and phusis, and his association with
Gorgias, this reading is somewhat misleading. Callicles is clearly not
a professional sophist himself—indeed Socrates mentions that
he despises them (520b). And his friend Gorgias is properly speaking a
rhetorician, i.e. a teacher of public speaking—presumably a
more practical, less intellectually pretentious (and so, to Callicles,
more manly) line of work. Most of all, the work to which Callicles
puts the trendy nomos-phusis distinction is essentially
traditional: his position is a somewhat feral variant on the ancient
elitist tradition in Greek moral thought, found for instance in
Theognis as well as Homer’s warrior ethic.

(4) Hedonism: Once the ‘strong’ have been identified as a
ruthlessly intelligent and daring natural elite, a second point of
clarification arises: of what, exactly, do they deserve more? Socrates
already pressed the point at the outset by, in his usual fashion,
posing it in the lowliest terms: should the stronger have a greater
share of food and drink, or clothes, or land? These suggestions are
scornfully rejected at first (490c–d); but Callicles does in the end
allow that eating and drinking, and even scratching or the life of a
catamite (a boy or youth who makes himself constantly available to a
man for the man’s sexual pleasure), count as instances of the
appetitive fulfilment he recommends (494b–e).

So it is not made clear to us what pleasures Callicles himself had in
mind—perhaps he himself is hazy on that point. All he says is
that the superior man must “allow his own appetites to get as
large as possible and not restrain them. And when they are as large as
possible, he ought to be competent to devote himself to them by virtue
of his courage and intelligence, and to fill him with whatever he may
have an appetite for at the time” (491e–492a). This seems to
leave the content of those appetites entirely a matter of subjective
preference. And Callicles eventually allows himself, without much
resistance, to be committed by Socrates to a simple and extreme form
of hedonism: all pleasures are good and pleasure is the good
(495a–e). Their arguments over this thesis stand at the start of a
fascinating and complex Greek debate over the nature and value of
pleasure, which is here understood as the ‘filling’ or
‘replenishment’ of some painful lack (e.g., the pleasure
of drinking is a replenishment in relation to the pain of thirst).
However, it is difficult to be sure how much this discussion tells us
about Callicles, since it is Socrates who elaborates the conception of
pleasure as replenishment on which it depends. Even the strength of
Callicles’ commitment to the hedonistic equation of pleasure and
the good is uncertain. At 499b, having been refuted by Socrates, he
casually allows that some pleasures are better than others; and as
noted above, hedonism was introduced in the first place not as a
thesis he was keen to propound, but as the answer to a question he
could not avoid—viz, the stronger should ‘have
more’ of what? Callicles’ philosophical
enthusiasm is not, it seems, for pleasure itself but for the
intensity, self-assertion and extravagance that accompany its pursuit
on a grand scale: he endorses hedonism so as to repudiate the
restraints of temperance, rather than the other way around. One way to
understand this rather oddly structured position is, again, as
inspired by the Homeric tradition. Callicles’ somewhat murky
ideal, the superior man, is imagined as having the arrogant grandeur
of the larger-than-life Homeric heroes; but what this new breed of
hero is supposed to fight for and be rewarded by remains cloudy to his
imagination.

5. Socrates vs. Callicles

The most fundamental difficulty with Callicles’ position is
brought out by Socrates’ final refutation at 497d–499b. This is
a simple and elegant argument which brings into collision
Callicles’ hedonism and his account of the virtues, roughly as
follows: (1) pleasure is the good; (2) good people are good by the
presence of good things; (3) good people are the virtuous, i.e., the
intelligent and courageous; (4) the foolish and cowardly sometimes
experience as much pleasure as the intelligent and courageous, or even
more; (5) therefore, bad people are sometimes as good as good ones, or
even better. Here, premises (1) and (3) represent Callicles’
hedonism and his account of the virtues respectively; (2) and (4) seem
undeniable; but (1), (2), and (4) together entail (5), which conflicts
with (3) and is anyway a contradiction in terms.

The problem is obvious: one cannot consistently claim both that
pleasure is the good, and that courage and intelligence
(which are manifestly not instances of pleasure, or derivative of it,
or even reliably correlated with it) are goods. Callicles
could perhaps respond that the virtues are instrumentally good: an
intelligent and courageous person is ‘good’ in the
indirect sense that he is, overall and in the long run, more apt than
others to obtain the good of pleasure. But this is not a very
plausible claim—least of all in the warfare-ridden world of
the Greek polis, where the coward might be at a significant
advantage for survival. And this ‘instrumentalist’ option
would in any case be false to Callicles’ spirit. His praise of
the virtues of the superior man expresses a hazy but genuine spirit of
admiration (like Thrasymachus with his ‘real ruler’),
rather than a calculation of instrumental utility. So Callicles is
genuinely torn. He is urging Socrates and us to pursue two ends which
are not only different but sometimes incompatible: pleasure and the
virtues as he understands them. Rather oddly, this is perhaps the
first clear formulation of what will later be a central contrast in
more standard philosophical ethical systems: the two ends represented
by ‘inclination’ and ‘duty’ (Kant), or the
‘dualism of practical reason’ (Sidgwick). And the case of
Callicles can help us to see an important point often obscured in
later versions, which is that some conflict along these lines can
arise even if one’s conception of virtue has nothing to do with
altruism. Even for an immoralist, there is room for a clash between
the ends set by self-interested desire and those derived from other,
disinterested origins (admiration of one’s heroes, for
instance)—between the advantages it is rational for us to pursue and the
sort of person we ought to try to be.

Like his praise of the justice of nature, Callicles’
non-instrumental attachment to the virtues of his superior man raises
the question whether ‘immoralist’ is really the right term
for him. He resembles his fan Nietzsche in being a shape-shifter: at
some points he seems to attack the legitimacy of moral norms as such,
but at others he offers what looks like his own morality, one indeed
which is much less new and radical than he seems to want us to think.
If we do want to retain the term ‘immoralist’ for him, we
need to allow that the basic immoralist challenge (that is, why be
just? or why be moral?) may be raised from two rather different
perspectives. Rather than being someone who disputes the rational
authority of ethical norms as such, as Thrasymachus seems to do, the
immoralist may be someone who has his own set of ethical norms and
ideals, ones which exclude ordinary morality.

Callicles himself does not seem to realize how deep the problems with
his position go. He responds to Socrates’ refutations by making
a rather shrug-like suggestion that (contrary to his earlier explicit
insistence) some pleasures are of course better than others (499b). In
the end, Callicles’ position is perhaps best seen as a series of
shifting suggestions or impulses—against conventional
justice, against temperance, for the Homeric
self-assertion of the strong, for pleasures and psychological
intensity—rather than a coherent set of philosophical theses.
The disunified quality of Callicles’ thought may actually be the
key to its perpetual power: almost all readers find something to tempt
them here, and are easily left with the lurking sense that the
‘real’ Calliclean position, whatever we might prefer it to
be, remains unrefuted. (And indeed of the four ingredients of
Callicles’ position discussed above, Socrates’ arguments
target only (3) and (4): whether (1) and (2) could be reconceived on
some lines not reliant on them is an open question.) This unease is
strengthened by a fifth component of Callicles’ position: his
attack on the value of philosophy itself. It is a prominent theme of
Callicles’ opening rants that philosophy, while a valuable part
of liberal education, is unworthy and a waste of time for a serious
adult (485e–486d). The life of philosophy is unmanly and immature, the
antithesis of an honorable public life; Socrates ought to ‘stop
this refuting’ and ‘leave these subtleties to
others’. Callicles’ anti-intellectualism does not prevent
him from showing some skill in dialectic, and more commitment to its
norms than most of Socrates’ interlocutors (e.g., at 495a). But
Callicles also claims that he argues only to please Gorgias (506c);
and in the end, he opts out of the discussion altogether, retreating
into surly silence. What makes this rejection of philosophical
dialectic disturbing is Callicles’ suggestion that
Socrates’ philosophical positions are just self-serving
expressions of his commitment to his own way of life—a version
of the plausible ancient Greek truism that each man naturally praises
his own way of life as best. According to Callicles, this means that
Socrates would have to change his practices to gain insight:
“This is the truth of the matter, as you will know if you
abandon philosophy and move on to more important things” (484c).
Callicles is here the first voice within philosophy to raise the
prospect that there are truths which philosophy itself may hide from
us. That is a possibility which Socrates clearly rejects; but it is
hard to see how he could refute it.

6. Conclusion: Thrasymachus, Callicles, Glaucon, Antiphon

One way to compare the two varieties of immoralism represented by
Thrasymachus and Callicles is to ask why Plato chose to represent the
former position in the Republic and the latter in the
Gorgias. The obvious answer is that the differences between
the two put them in very different relations to Socrates and his
defense of justice, suitably calibrated to the ambitions of the works
in question. Socrates and Callicles are antitheses: they address the
same questions and give directly conflicting answers. Each offers a
positive account of the real nature of justice, grounded in a broader
conception of human nature and the nature of things. Indeed, viewed at
a high level of abstraction, and if we allow Socrates the fuller
positive theory provided in the Republic, their positions are
remarkably similar. For in the Republic we see that Plato in
fact agrees with Callicles that the many should be ruled by the
superior few—i.e., the intelligent and courageous—and
that it is only natural and just for the latter to have greater
happiness and pleasure than the many. Where they differ is in the
content they give to this shared schema. From the point of view of
Socrates or Plato, Callicles is wrong about nature (including human
nature); wrong about what intelligence and virtue actually consist in;
wrong about what the point and purpose of political rule is; and wrong
about the nature of the good at which the superior man aims. His
version of the immoralist challenge is thus, for all its tremendous
rhetorical power, less philosophically threatening than it might be;
for it depends on a rather rich positive theory (of the good, human
nature, human virtue, and politics) which Plato thinks he can show to
be false. Thrasymachus, by contrast, presents himself as more of a
social critic: while persuasively debunking justice as conventionally
understood, he fails to offer any account of real virtue in its stead.
The closest he comes to presenting a substitute norm is in his praise
of the expertly rational real ruler—an ideal which is pursued
and developed more fully both by Callicles in the Gorgias and
by Socrates in the Republic itself.

So where the Gorgias presents a mirroring and confrontation
between two complete ethical stances, the immoralist and the Socratic,
the Republic depicts a complex dialectical progression from
the one to the other. It also gestures towards the Calliclean
alternative with Glaucon’s speech in Book II. Glaucon presents
his attack on justice as a restatement of Thrasymachus’ position
(358c); but it represents a considerable advance in theoretical
sophistication, and the differences bring it closer to Callicles. Like
Callicles, Glaucon concerns himself explicitly with the nature and
origin of justice, classifying it as a merely instrumental good (or a
necessary evil) and locating its origins in a social contract. By
nature we are all pleonectic; but since we stand to lose more than we
could gain from unbridled pleonexia we have entered into a
compact neither to do nor to allow injustice. As the famous
‘ring of Gyges’ thought-experiment is supposed to show,
however, nobody has any real commitment to acting justly when they
think they can get away with injustice; for if someone can commit
injustice undetected there is no reason for him not to. Thus Glaucon
agrees with Callicles in identifying justice as a matter of
convention, and in holding that it conflicts with our nature. At the
same time, he remains with Thrasymachus in not articulating any
alternative moral norm; and he departs from both in not relying on the
dubious division of mankind into two essentially different kinds, the
allegedly ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’. He thus
seems to represent the immoralist challenge in a fully developed yet
streamlined form, shorn of unnecessary complications and theoretical
assumptions and reducible to a simple, pressing question: given the
merely conventional character of justice and the constraints it places
on our pleonectic nature, why should any one of us be just, whenever
injustice would be to our advantage?

This is also the challenge posed by the sophist Antiphon, in the
surviving fragments of his discussion of justice in On Truth
(see Pendrick 2002 for the texts of Antiphon, and Gagarin and Woodruff
1995 or Dillon and Gergel 2003 for translation). Antiphon argues that
justice is only ever a matter of following the laws of one’s own
community; and that there is no good reason for anyone to obey those
laws when they can break them without fear of detection and
punishment. For nature too has its laws, which conflict with those of
society, and violation of these is punished infallibly.
Antiphon’s text and meaning are unclear at some crucial points,
but the idea seems to be that the laws of society require us to act
against our own interests, by constraining our animal natures and
limiting our natural desires and pleasures; and that it is foolish to
obey these laws when we can get away with following nature instead.
Without wanting to deny the existence of other contemporary figures
working similar terrain, we can easily read Callicles, Thrasymachus,
and Glaucon as Plato’s disentangling and disambiguation of
Antiphon’s ideas into three possible positions, distinguished to
clarify the various philosophical forms that a broadly immoralist
stance might take. Thrasymachus represents the essentially negative,
cynical, and debunking side of the immoralist stance, grounded in
empirical observations of the ways of the world. At the same time his
idealization of the ‘real ruler’ suggests that this is an
unstable and incomplete position, liable to progress to a Calliclean
‘heroic’ form of immoralism. Callicles represents
immoralism as a new morality, dependent on the contrasts between
nature and convention and between the strong and the weak. Glaucon
shows that the immoralist challenge has no need of the latter (nor,
for that matter, of Thrasymachus’ ideal of the real ruler).
Immoralism is for everybody: we are all complicit in the social
compact which establishes law as a brake on self-interest, and we all
have reason to cheat on it when we can. This, Plato’s
presentation suggests, is ultimately the most challenging form of the
immoralist stance; and it is probably the closest to its historical
original in Antiphon himself. Whether the whole argument of the
Republic suffices to defeat it remains a matter of live
philosophical debate.

–––, 1985, Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

–––, 1997, “Plato Against the
Immoralist”, in Platon: Politeia, O. Höffe (ed.),
Berlin: Akademie Verlag; reprinted in his The Sense of the Past:
Essays on the History of Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006.

The Greek moral tradition, the Sophists and their social context (including Antiphon)